Daniel Defoe

It has been until recently a given of literary history that William Beckford had his half-sister in his sights in his two burlesques on women's novel-writing. The title-page of the first quotes Pope , thus...

Paula R. Backscheider has noted the extraordinary popularity of this three-volume publication as measured in numbers of editions or re-issues: seventy-nine by 1825, eighty-nine by 1840, and in every decade from the 1730s to the...

PA began publishing early in the eighteenth century. She is chiefly known for her short novels, though she turned her hand to poetry and comedy as well. At the height of her career her rate...

CF was a remarkable, indeed a unique, travel-writer about her own country. Travelling in the later seventeenth and the early eighteenth century, and writing the account that has come down to us in the latter...

The hostile story which has her establishing herself as a confidence trickster, using her sexual charms to prey on men in the manner of fictional characters like her avowed disciple Defoe 's Roxana, is borne...

The Critical Review declined to comment on this book or to differentiate it from other religious novels. The Eclectic Review of November 1805, too, found similarities with other recent works, but dignified Interesting Conversations by...

Geraldine Jewsbury 's review in the Athenæum was extremely positive. She praised the book as written with great force and earnestness, saying that even the hardened novel readers and stony-hearted critics at the Athenæumhave...

Her new religion, rigorous as it was, did not forbid fiction. Books were at a premium in India, and MMS was delighted at encountering Defoe 's Robinson Crusoe and Richardson . A new book, or...

These gripping stories do not feature Albert Campion. Each is set in a small rural community where a culture of voracious gossip threatens the reputation and happiness of somewhat unconventional young women. In each the...

Writing to Mary Russell Mitford of her hope that they might meet, HM acknowledged the influence which the spirit of your writings has had over me. Her reading included Shakespeare , Smollett ...

PA 's preface attacks the abominable Writings of the freethinker John Toland and promises: If this Trifle sells you may be sure to hear of me again. It asserts her claim that she writes...

Memorials included just fifteen of her writings, both prose and verse. It added several poems to her known oeuvre. Epistle on the Subjects of Botany, containing a tale and much good advice welcomes the opening...

In this report FN explains how formerly nurses were women who were too old, too weak, too drunken, too dirty, too stolid, or too bad to do anything else. While she recommends introducing...

Having related his marriage in Lady Lucy, PA is forced (rather like Behn opening The Second Part of the Rover or Defoe opening Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe) to begin her sequel with...

This and JB 's next novel are both more episodic than Love Intrigues. In To the Reader she defends her own patchwork method (so different from the extended narrative method which she associates, though...